Ad Requirements

It must be an advertisement soliciting the participation and contribution of programmers writing actual source code. This is not intended as a general purpose ad for consumer products which just happen to be open source. It's for finding programmers who will help contribute code or other programmery things (documentation, code review, bugfixes, etc).

In order to work, the answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules.

Answer Template

[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
[1]: http://image-url
[2]: http://clickthrough-url

Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to add any commentary, keep it in the comments.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 220px by 220px

Can be hosted anywhere (tinypic, twitpic, your blog); we will mirror the image locally when we serve it.

Must be GIF or PNG

No animated GIFs

Absolute limit on filesize of ~150kb

The output, which ultimately will be served in an ad slot on Stack Overflow, can be previewed by clicking through to this URL:

There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be served up by that URL and shown on Stack Overflow. You can see all the ads that currently make the threshold and meet our criteria on this page:

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

3

Will there be similar ones for the rest of the trilogy? Apps like pidgin could go to superuser and serverfault could get admin-oriented tools.
–
alancDec 5 '09 at 3:49

3

@Jeff. I think this is a wonderful scheme you have going here. The only thing is I find it frustrating to see the add and not have a explanation of what it is. I know you said this can be done via comments but it doesn't seem to be happening so far.
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Tim MurphyDec 19 '09 at 11:25

7

Can other sites run these ads? IE are they contributed beyond just stackoverflow?
–
dlamblinDec 19 '09 at 15:40

3

Is it just me, or are the majority of the ads here not an ad for programmers, but for a product?
–
PowerlordDec 21 '09 at 19:31

3

R. Bemrose, one assumes that programmers would want to try the product then contribute to it. So the rule is, the project must allow outside code contributions and somewhat actively solicit outside code contributions.
–
Jeff Atwood♦Dec 21 '09 at 20:20

2

It would be interesting to see a report comparing the effectiveness of the adds (how many people clicked on them) vs. how high they were voted. Are Meta user's effective add pickers or are they just oppinionated?
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AnonymousJan 1 '10 at 19:24

Rather than adds for Open Source Projects, I'd really appreciate a list of projects that need help with a quick summary of what needs to be done in each one--what they are hoping to accomplish with this additional manpower. If there is such a site, advertise that!
–
user140390Feb 18 '10 at 23:33

5

Are dupes with different ad images acceptable? Doesn't exactly seem fair to load up multiple ads for a single project and drown out others.
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randomFeb 21 '10 at 4:28

@Tronic, as you can see the link redirects to the "how to contribute" to project page -- because, according to policy these ads are rather ads that ask to help the project rather the project itself. So you only need to go to main page -- cppcms.sourceforge.net/wikipp/en/page/main to see what is all about.
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ArtyomMar 26 '10 at 22:08

7

The black text makes it a bit unreadable with that background.
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fretjeMar 29 '10 at 16:37

The dark, grey-blue sky is dreary and depressing. Based on this ad alone, I'm not excited about CppCMS.
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macekMay 4 '10 at 18:39

1

The extra time/energy/cost spent by debugging, bug reporting, yelling, smashing computers and getting new ones, visiting insane asylums, cleaning up after hackers smashing the stack, memory leaks etc, etc will certainly be more than whatever CO2 was saved by coding in C++...
–
LongpokeMay 16 '10 at 23:13

1

@SamB as java, python or any other language - crash
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ArtyomJun 6 '10 at 17:55

1

-1 Lets stop using C++ for everything because its insecure and old.(Its funny because i'm a C++ dev for a living) PHP's hiphop is an exception because your developing/debugging in a modern language.
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RookJun 8 '10 at 22:02

@macek: What do you want to know? Template Toolkit it arguably one of the most used opensource templating systems out there and used by some big companies. Its a grandaddy of the template systems and as influenced many others of the years. TT2 is currently available in Perl & Python. And there is a complete TT3 rewrite which could always do with a hand or two: github.com/abw/Template-TT3
–
draegtunMay 6 '10 at 10:24

1

Dang True! For what it does TT is one of the open source greats. TT docs should be required reading for anyone who works with or builds any kind of string templating system.
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dreftymacMay 20 '10 at 16:04

@Mauricio - NPOI needs someone with graphic talent to give it some love! :) But in the meantime, NPOI is used to read/write Excel .xls files in Microsoft .NET Framework.
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Leniel MacaferiMar 11 '10 at 23:48

Wing Beats is an internal little language (DSL) for creating XHTML. It is based on F# and includes an ASP.NET MVC view engine, but can also be used solely for it's capability of creating XHTML.
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Johan JonassonMay 20 '10 at 20:28

I think this deserves a lot more attention.
–
frgtnMar 28 '10 at 15:53

2

"Help us get better"? "Help us become better"? The poor grammar, it burns us.
–
user145347Mar 29 '10 at 16:15

1

"I'm not a native English speaker and learning only by experiences. Also I'm still not convinced that help us getting better is incorrect grammatically. I might change my views and the ad picture if get more comments about it." - Author.
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Vikrant ChaudharyApr 3 '10 at 10:22

Respectfully, you may wish to re-consider your approach if you are trying to make a more 'favorable' impression. How does this ad help to counteract the message of the previous ad? If anything, it seems to perfectly reinforce the point. Even if people can decipher your point about the White House, U.S. Government agencies are notorious for deploying sloppy, bloated, inelegant code that no one wants to acknowledge, let alone maintain. Ask anybody with knowledge on this subject.
–
dreftymacApr 12 '10 at 20:39

3

The Ad requirements say: "It must be an advertisement soliciting the participation and contribution of programmers writing actual source code. This is not intended as a general purpose ad for consumer products which just happen to be open source."
–
dreftymacApr 13 '10 at 16:29